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Growing your brand in the experience ageA new approach to brand management

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Think of an iconic brand. You know, the kind of brand that has people lining up around the block when they launch a new product. Or whose customers will gladly pay a premium even when their products are almost identical to those of their competitors.

The chances are you could draw their logo from memory. You can probably name the last ad you saw from them, or the last product you bought, or even remember the last interaction you had with a member of their staff.

Strong brands attract customers, encourage them to spend more and come back time and time again.

It’s clear that a strong brand is one of the most powerful growth levers any company has, yet it remains one of the hardest to get right.

The experience economy demands a new approach for brands

84% of the

market cap of

companies listed

on the S&P 500

can be attributed

to intangible assets

like brand.

30 years ago, it

accounted for just

32%.

1.https://www.businessintangibles.com/single-post/2015/03/11/Intangible-Assets-Increase-to-84-of-the-SP-500s-Value-in-2015-Report

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Brand is (almost) everything in the Experience Economy

Marketers today are faced with

consumers who churn more frequently

than ever, and a technology landscape

that has lowered the barriers to entry

for competitors and provided infinitely

more channels for communicating with

their target audiences.

Add to that the fact that consumer

perceptions of a brand are impacted by

so many factors outside of marketing’s

purview — like product development

and employee experience — and it’s

clear to see why this new era demands a

new approach to brand growth.

In this e-book, we explore some of the

challenges facing today’s marketers

and brand managers and propose a new

approach to brand management that

moves away from static brand tracking

towards a Brand Experience program

that’s instant, embedded in your operations, and breaks down silos to

get to the root cause of brand growth.

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Today’s technology landscape has changed the game for

brands on two fronts: fragmenting their audience across

multiple channels, and opening them up to more competition

than ever before.

Where once, if you wanted to launch a new brand and take

on the established players, you needed deep pockets or a

significant capital investment, the technology available to

brands today has lowered the barriers to entry.

You can set up a professional website on Squarespace, build

an eCommerce platform on Amazon Web Services, and

advertise to hundreds of millions of people through Facebook

and YouTube — all in the space of a few days.

It means new brands can spring up from nowhere, take

advantage of a gap in the market and, before you even know

they’re a threat, take a healthy chunk out of your market

share.

Just ask Dollar Shave Club, Deliveroo, WeWork, Peloton, Uber

and the thousands of other disruptors who’ve come from

nowhere to grow at a phenomenal rate on the coattails of the

digital revolution.

Competition for customers’ attention is more intense than ever A BRAND

IS NO LONGER WHAT WE TELL THE CONSUMER IT IS — IT IS WHAT CONSUMERS TELL EACH OTHER IT IS.”

SCOTT COOK

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MORE COMPETITORS, MORE CHANNELS

It’s not just having more competitors that’s causing

headaches for brands either — the media landscape has

changed to such an extent that it’s now harder than ever

to cut through, even for those with the deepest pockets.

On any given day, a consumer is exposed to anywhere between 4,000 and 10,000 brand messages2. The

new digital landscape means ‘always on’ translates into

‘always available’ when it comes to brands and their

ability to expose us to their latest campaigns.

drop over the past 15 years3

8 SECONDS

4 SECONDS

The average human attention span is

2.https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/08/25/finding-brand-success-in-the-digital-world/#56ae55cc626e3.https://dl.motamem.org/microsoft-attention-spans-research-report.pdf

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It’s made marketers’ jobs that much

harder. Where once a :30 spot on one of

the main TV networks was sure to get you

mass reach, today that same audience is

fragmented across traditional media like

TV and radio as well as streaming services,

social media and countless other digital

platforms.

And to make things harder still, our

attention spans are getting shorter and

shorter. In fact, the average attention span

is now just 8 seconds — shorter than that

of a goldfish.

It’s all part of human evolution — as we drink

from the almost unavoidable firehose of

content, our brains have evolved to process

more information, more quickly and switch

between tasks in the blink of an eye.

It means brands now have less time, more

channels, and more competition, making it

more important than ever to find ways to cut

through the noise and resonate with their

audience.

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Branding — saving people time since 1885

IT’S A COMPLICATED AND NOISY WORLD, AND WE’RE NOT GOING TO GET A CHANCE TO GET PEOPLE TO REMEMBER MUCH ABOUT US.”

STEVE JOBS

It’s easy to imagine customers standing in a store or

switching between tabs as they rationally weigh the pros and

cons of two products before making a decision which one to

buy — but in reality they’re not nearly as rational as that.

Consumers spend as little as 7 seconds4 thinking about a

brand, and the vast majority of buying decisions are ‘System

1’ neurological responses, i.e. those automatic, emotion-

driven responses as opposed to slower, more rational

responses.

It’s all based on intuition. We’re born with an automatic

mechanism to memorise emotional responses whenever we have a new experience. When we face that,

or a similar experience again, the brain draws on this

memory to inform our decision making, overriding the

rational part of the brain.

It’s why, when faced with two products, one from an entirely

unknown brand which has better features and is, rationally

speaking, a more logical choice, consumers often go with

the so-called ‘lesser’ product from a brand they know and

have previously had a positive experience with.

4. https://blog.drupa.com/de/how-product-packaging-affects-buying-decisions/

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NO EMOTION, NO DECISION

In a 1994 study, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio found that

when the brain is unable to process emotion, people are unable to make decisions. Studying people with damage to

the part of the brain where emotions are generated, he found

that although they could describe what they should be doing

in logical terms, they found it difficult to make even simple

decisions such as deciding what to eat.

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It starts with brand recognition. Say you’re

faced with 15 cans of cola on a supermarket

shelf, your brain will process them in a

fraction of a second, narrowing it down to

one or two whose brands you recognise from

brand assets like the logo or color of the can.

Memory then kicks in, using the experiences

you’ve had in the past with those brands to

make the final choice.

We rely on recognition, memories, familiarity,

and perceptions of certain brands to lead and

in many cases drive our consideration set.

These perceptions are built over time from

a whole variety of experiences we have with

brands from exposure to TV commercials,

packaging, marketing messages, and our

previous experience with the product.

Over time this forms attitudes and

perceptions in consumers’ minds about

particular brands, predisposing them to liking

one brand over another. And that’s it —

brand preference is born!

The world’s most successful brands are

essentially cognitive time-savers. They work

hard to deliver on brand experiences that

drive recognition, create familiarity and

firmly plant perceptions in their customers

minds so the next time they need to make a

decision, it all happens in an instant.

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In order to grow your brand, you need to be able to fulfil a role in people’s lives, make it relevant, and deliver on it brilliantly and consistently.

That’s no easy feat given the competitive and technological landscape that requires brands to keep one eye over their shoulders while simultaneously sharing their message across a growing number of platforms.

While in the past, ‘brand work’ often came down to catchy taglines, jingles or visual cues such as iconography and logos, over the past 20 years brand marketers shifted their focus to other elements, focusing on things like more precise targeting and trying to fulfill more niche roles in consumers’ lives in a bid to differentiate themselves from the competition.

The fundamentals of branding are to be ignored at your peril.

Given that you only have :07 for customers to make their decision, it’s essential that they are able to recognise your products and services and make a snap decision about whether your brand is right for them.5

Add to that the sheer volume of messages consumers are now exposed to, and it’s clear brands need to go back to basics and focus once more on the essentials.

Secure a place in consumers brains — not their hearts AT BMW WE

DO NOT BUILD CARS AS OBJECTS TO GET PEOPLE FROM A TO B. WE BUILDMOBILE WORKSOF ART.”

CHRIS BANGLE, CAR DESIGNER, BMW

5.Professor Ravi Dhar, Yale School of Management

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As a bare minimum, any product or service must fulfill a basic consumer need, say the need for food, entertainment, access to the internet, etc.

Some brands go further and are able to differentiate themselves from the competition by appealing to higher order needs too, such as identity, affiliation, and environmental or societal good.

The most successful brands focus their investments on activities designed to train consumers’ muscle memory through delivering on their needs, time and time again, and making it easy to recognise their brands amongst the noise.

There are 4 basic principles every brand needs to get right to do that:

1PURPOSE

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CONSISTENCY

We’ve seen already that consumer decisions are not the result of rational thinking — they’re intuitive reactions based on learned experiences. It means brands need to consistently deliver on their purpose to train consumers’ muscle memory and make choosing their product a habit.

That means consistently delivering on the product experience, and consistently delivering on the customer experience too, so that every interaction with the brand is used as an opportunity to cement customer perceptions.

The most successful brands do that by aligning everything back to their purpose, so whether customers interact with the product, a customer service agent, or a staff member in-store, they receive a consistent experience that plants itself firmly in their minds.

DIFFERENTIATION

There’s nothing worse than investing time and money in a campaign that does more to drive your competitors’ sales than your own. It’s why iconic brands spend billions designing logos, jingles or visual imagery that’s unique to them.

Think golden arches and swooshes — these iconic logos are quick to process and immediately associated with McDonalds and Nike. Without brand recognition, you’re fighting a losing battle in the competition for customer attention.

It goes beyond just the logos, too. Think about the iconic design of the Lego brick. Or the user experience of the iPhone. Or the service delivered by staff onboard a Virgin Atlantic flight. It comes down to muscle memory again, constantly reinforcing those things that make you different from your competitors and reserving a space in consumers minds.

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RESONANCE

A purpose and a company that consistently delivers on it means nothing if it doesn’t resonate with consumers. Brands need to be able to cut through the noise across multiple channels because resonating with consumers is key.

The very basic requirement here is to address a need at a price people are willing to pay, and make the product available. Going further, you can employ other tactics to cut through and create positive associations with your brand, for example using celebrity endorsements to link your brand with a certain lifestyle. It’s important here to be responsive to changes in society as people’s attitudes shift, and make sure that you continue to be relevant (without abandoning your purpose of course!).

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RESONANCE Everyone needs cleaning products, so that checks off the basic requirement. Method goes a step further too, with a purpose that resonates with growing concerns consumers have about the environment and their impact on it.

PURPOSE Method fulfills a basic purpose of cleaning your home, but goes beyond that into higher-order needs with a commitment to products that contain only natural ingredients, thus serving an environmental need.

CONSISTENCY Method’s products never contain chemicals (how’s that for consistent?), and they maintain a consistent design language with their iconic simple packaging, primary colors and recognisable logo — there’s no chance of mistaking their brand for someone else’s. They walk the walk too, with a company culture built around its purpose. In 2013, Method reincorporated as a public benefit corporation, and run multiple initiatives with its employees to give back to society through its People Against Dirty Initiative. This serves to reinforce the brand’s higher order purpose by consistently delivering on it at every touchpoint.

DIFFERENTIATION Before Method, nobody in their space was producing chemical-free cleaning products. They differentiated themselves from the likes of P&G, Unilever, and Johnson & Johnson with a product that was genuinely different and bold design assets that were in stark contrast to the brand mascots that adorned the packaging of most of their competitors.Established

in 2000, Method is now valued at more than $100M.

Organic growth with 100% natural products

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We live in turbulent times — you only have to look at a list

of the world’s leading brands to see how quickly things can

change in the Experience Economy.

Just a decade ago, the world’s top 10 brands didn’t include

the likes of Facebook, Amazon or Apple. Instead there were

brands like Intel, IBM and even Nokia, which today doesn’t

even rank in the top 100.

Over the past 15 years, 52% of Fortune 500 companies

have disappeared, including big brands like Sears,

Pontiac and Kodak.6 They’ve fallen victim to a competitive

landscape where disruption is fast becoming the norm

and failing to respond quickly can cost even the most

established brands dearly.

Brands can no longer afford to stand still

THE CONCEPT OF DISRUPTION IS ABOUT COMPETITIVE RESPONSE; IT IS NOT A THEORY OF GROWTH. IT’S ADJACENT TO GROWTH. BUT IT’S NOT ABOUT GROWTH.”

CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN52% of Fortune 500

companies disappearedin the past 15 years

6. https://hbr.org/sponsored/2017/07/digital-transformation-is-racing-ahead-and-no-industry-is-immune-2

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It is now more essential than ever that

brands can respond quickly to changes, not

just in their competitive landscape but also

in society as consumers’ preferences and

expectations shift at a rate not seen before.

Waiting 6 months for data on your latest ad

campaign, or to find that a new competitor

has taken a bite out of your market share

with a differentiated new offering, is no

longer sustainable.

Brand managers need access to always-on brand data — both X- and O-Data — to

spot challenges and opportunities, and

react quickly to changes that drive growth.

History is littered with brands that were

unable, or unwilling, to respond to change.

And when brands stagnate or decline, it

is rarely because of something they have

done — usually, it is something they have

failed to do.

They fail to respond to change, they lose

their differentiation or their relevance,

and it opens up opportunities for their

competitors to take advantage.

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Brand remains one of the most important growth levers

any company has, but the problem for marketers is that

it’s largely intangible, and impacted by so many different

factors outside of marketing and advertising.

You could deliver an incredibly successful ad campaign, firmly planting your new product in

consumers’ minds and far exceeding your sales targets.

But what happens if the product fails to deliver on the

experience?

Or when customers contact your support team only to find

them unhelpful?

Or they head to one of your stores, to find staff don’t have

enough knowledge about the product to be helpful?

Each one of those experiences has a profound impact

on the brand that goes way beyond what the brand and

marketing team have control over.

Brand is everyone’s responsibility now

YOUR BRAND IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT INVESTMENT YOU CAN MAKE IN YOUR BUSINESS.”

STEVE FORBES

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Those experiences plant themselves in the memory,

categorised under ‘bad experiences,’ laying in wait to

inform that customer’s decision-making next time they’re

faced with a choice between brands.

So perhaps that drop-off you’ve noticed in brand

preference isn’t because your ad campaign failed.

Or that change in brand perception isn’t because you didn’t

make the logo big enough on your Facebook posts?

It could just as likely be something happening on the

product, employee, or customer experience front.

If just one experience fails to meet the brand promise and

the expectations of your customers, it can impact the brand

as a whole.

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ALIGN THE ENTIRE ORGANISATION TO YOUR BRAND

The world’s most iconic brands start with

a purpose; they design products to deliver

it, align their employee cultures behind

it, enable their teams to deliver on it, and

inject it into every touchpoint with their

customers.

The marketing team simply pulls

the strings to find the best way to

communicate it, over and over again, on

the right channels, to the right people, to

plant it firmly in consumers’ minds.

Brand is the sum of all an organisation’s

parts, so it’s essential that your HR teams,

product development, and customer

service functions are aligned behind it

as you look to consistently deliver on the

brand experience.

This shift requires a new way of thinking

about brand measurement. All too often

brand work results in a static report,

presented to the marketing leadership and

then left untouched for the next 6 months.

It’s rarely shared wider, and even more

rarely is it connected to the rich sources of

data brands now have on their customer,

product, and employee experiences.

To grow your brand in the experience

economy, you need to be able to bring together every metric that matters from

traditional brand tracking O-data — like

recall or ad effectiveness — as well as your

X- and O-data from the wider organisation.

It’s only then that you’ll truly be able

to identify the levers to pull across the

organisation from HR through to product

development to forge connections with your

customers and grow your brand.

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Ask anyone to name an iconic brand and the chances are it won’t be long before they mention Disney. For decades, Disney has been a mainstay of the world’s most powerful, and valuable brands. And the secret to their success? It’s all about consistency.

Disney’s purpose has always been to create happiness through magical experiences, and there are few better examples than Disneyland.

There’s the PRODUCT — you’ll be hard pressed to find a new ride or experience that opens at any of its parks without rigorous customer testing to make sure it meets expectations.

And there’s the staff, sorry, CAST MEMBERS. Such is Disney’s commitment to consistent delivery that the word ‘staff’ is never used — instead they are all cast members in a show for their guests. Regardless of their role, all cast members from car park attendants to a newly hired CMO go through the same training — it’s recognition that whatever the job, they’re delivering experiences at every moment to their customers.

Then there’s the CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE. New innovations like Magic Bands, My Magic+, and MyDisneyExperience.com have been introduced in recent years to reduce wait times, make it easier to book experiences with Disney characters and address many of the frustrations customers have at other theme parks that would certainly not feel ‘magical’.

And then there’s the iconic LOGO and characters that are instantly recognisable. But beyond that, even the hair color, make-up and nail polish of character cast members has strict guidelines to ensure they’re recognised. And regardless of which cast member signs your autograph book as Mickey Mouse, the signature is always the same (thanks to plenty of training of course!).

YOU CAN DREAM, CREATE, DESIGN AND BUILD THE MOST WONDERFUL PLACE IN THE WORLD, BUT IT REQUIRES PEOPLE TO MAKE THE DREAM A REALITY.”

WALT DISNEY

The magic behind the mouse

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Brand and marketing teams find themselves in the unenviable position of trying to monitor and improve one of the hardest things to quantify.

It’s not just because of the number of channels they now have to manage, or because of the myriad factors that impact the brand experience, but also the tools they have traditionally had available.

Where a customer experience team has both relational and transactional studies, allowing them to spot a drop in NPS and then quickly find the root cause, traditional approaches to brand tracking give brand managers the challenge of monitoring brand metrics like ad effectiveness without the data to understand the ‘why’.

Clickthrough rates might be down, but why aren’t people clicking on your ads?

Why do customers who visit a store have a lower brand preference than those who buy online?

Grow your brand with experience, not tracking

Does the product meet the expectations you’ve set with your customers?

Traditional brand tracking answers none of these questions. They typically include consumer data which is more often than not backward-looking, biased, static and siloed from other essential data sources that impact the brand.

Take campaign clickthrough rates for example. By the time you’ve spotted an issue, you’ve potentially wasted millions in advertising spend with no impact on the bottom line.

Or a new campaign which you find, 6 months after launch, that consumers are wrongly attributing it to your biggest competitor. You’ll have spent 6 months of your media budget building your competitor’s brand!

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BRAND EXPERIENCE —THE NEW WAY TO GROW YOUR BRAND

Organisations need to move away from simply ‘tracking’ past performance towards a more holistic Brand Experience program that brings together all the intelligence they need to grow their brand.

It helps you look ahead and prioritise the actions that will have the biggest impact on your growth — before you’ve invested your advertising budget.

Traditional brand studies like creative testing, or brand lift can be included to help calibrate creatives against past creatives, and set performance benchmarks. Campaigns can be evaluated based on their effectiveness in driving perceptions for the brand, and poor performing campaigns can be pulled before they’ve been allowed to run ineffectively.

Brand Experience also introduces your competitive landscape into the mix, giving

you a real-time view of how your competitors are doing at each stage in the funnel in comparison to your own brand. It helps you spot opportunities and act quickly to take advantage of them, as well as get ahead of emerging threats like new competitors waiting to disrupt the market if you don’t react.

And when you integrate it with other sources of data too, like social media, finance systems, employee, customer and product experience programs, you have the ultimate instrument of Experience Management, helping you get to the root cause of brand growth, wherever it sits in the organisation.

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Ready to go from brand tracking to brand experience?

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